Ideology and Sustainability

I get some very quick reactions to my main page on the
sustainability of material progress.
Quick reactions, whether favorable or
unfavorable, cannot be based on reading the 50 or so pages. They are
reactions to my attitude, which is apparent in the first paragraph.
For many, prophesying doom if we don't change our ways, is a signal of
virtue. Others are irritated by doom-saying and have an immediate
favorable reaction. There are at least some who are worried by the
problems that have been proposed as obstacles to sustainability and
can be relieved by information about why they are not likely to
stop progress. Maybe these are few, judging from the small number of
questions that I get asking for elaboration of a particular point.

If we want to understand the politics of the environment and the
attitudes of various people and groups toward questions of material
progress and sustainability, we have to understand ideology as a
social and political force.

Here's what Webster's dictionary gives us for ideology:

1 : visionary theorizing
2 a : a systematic body of concepts esp. about human life or
culture
b : a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an
individual, group, or culture
c : the integrated assertions, theories, and aims that
constitute a sociopolitical program

We are mostly concerned with 2b and 2c.

Ideological Tribes in America

Let's try to get above the battles for a while and look at human
ideologies from a Martian point of view.

American social thought is mainly polarized along one axis -
the liberal - conservative axis.

Most people who pay attention to the issues belong to one or the
other ideological tribe. Each tribe has its views on a
whole spectrum of issues, although logically these issues are not
strongly correlated.

Here are some of the issues.

abortion

gun control

nuclear power

national defense

affirmative action

communism - in Cuba and formerly Soviet communism

multi-culturalism

what to do about poverty

what to do about the environment

gay rights

global warming

relative importance of equality of opportunity and equality of outcome

punishment of harassing or offending others vs. free speech

People's attitudes on these 10 issues tend to be strongly correlated,
although logically there should be little connection between a
person's attitude to abortion and his attitude to multi-culturalism.

Here's
a nice example
of a reaction to my Web page on nuclear
energy that illustrates membership in one tribe with many causes.

Whether a person is religious seems independent of his views on the
above issues, but most denominations seem to adhere to one tribe
or the other.

Most politically aware people get their opinions on the separate
issues from the media leaders of their tribe.

The views about who are the bad guys and who are the good guys are often
more influential with a tribe member than any of the specific issues,
and they outlast opinions on the issues.

There are substantial biological and childhood experience
components in ideology. Ideology is determined early, especially
the notions of who are the bad guys. The notions of who are the bad
guys are more stable than the notions of who are the good guys.

For many politically active people, perhaps most, fighting evil
is perceived as more important than doing good.

Some scholars distinguish between classical and romantic
personalities, the latter supposedly more interested in how they feel
than in what they think. I fit the classical model.

The majority of the public pays little attention to ideological
matters. It doesn't read editorials or opinion columns and doesn't
spend much time watching opinion-oriented TV. For this reason
the majority isn't solidly enrolled in either tribe, and their
opinions on the different issues are more likely to be
uncorrelated and independent.

In spite of the tribalism, objective thinking about issues and
problems does play
a role in determining a person's position. The interaction of this
with subjective factors needs to be understood. Objective thinking
needs to be distinguished from merely thinking up arguments in
favor of a pre-existing position.

The primary reservoir of objective thinking in human society is
professional science. However, many scientists do not preserve
their scientific attitude when the issues are far from their own
fields. Many do, however, and individuals differ a great deal in
the breadth of their scientific study. Some read only in a narrow
field while others are well informed about many.

Ideological Vested Interests

Much that is written about public attitudes supposes that the public
reacts directly to the facts. For example, Chauncey Starr's writings
about the way the public responds to risk seems to assume this.
However, the public gets its information through the media, and media
people are likely to have tribal loyalties.

Moreover, what the media say is strongly affected by the existence of
organizations. These cause a kind of hysteresis in the
public response to events. An organization comes into existence,
because of its founders' reactions to events. While the founders are
still in control the organization's attitude may change. However,
once the organization is set in its ways, events have very little
effect on its attitudes. While an individual may react directly to a
new fact about an issue, an official of an organization that has
commitments cannot. Neither can a lawyer for an organization. The
organization has a position, and the lawyer has the organization as a
client. The same is true of the public relations people in an
organization.

Pessimism as an ideology

It seems to me that pessimism has to be regarded as an ideology quite apart
from the particular phenomena a person is pessimistic about. Maybe
the psychological cause of pessimism is the realization by the individual
of his own inevitable death, certainly a misfortune. I remember being
quite disappointed at the age of 5 when I realized that I would eventually
die.

Nevertheless, people differ in their personal attitudes of pessimism or
optimism. Pessimists generally consider themselves to be somehow morally
superior to optimists, as is indicated by the derogatory terms used to
refer to optimistic views. [I plan to put in a few examples here.]
They include "cornucopians", "polyannas", techno-optimists,etc. Another
derogatory term is "technofix", trying to fix a problem with technology
that they think ought to be fixed by reforming people's ideas.

The most obvious published expressions of pessimism are about the human
future, and they come from both sides of the political spectrum. Maybe
moderates are less pessimistic than extremists. It is interesting that
after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the prospect of the
US being substantially destroyed by Soviet missiles, many writings and
speeches begin, "Now more than ever ...".

Besides pessimism per se, some people are dominated by a sense of sin,
sometimes their own but more often other people's. Here's
STOP ALL SPACE EXPLORATION NOW!. The reason given is
that humanity has messed up this planet and shouldn't be allowed in
space. The link died, so I hope the guy changed his mind. [2003 note: Alas,
he only changed his address. It works now.]

Egalitarianism

That everyone should be equal is an idea that has intrinsic appeal.
However, there are different senses of equality and one may favor
some and not others.

Equality before the law

We are quite used to the idea that the law applies equally to
everyone. However, the idea is relatively new. Many societies were
established by conquest, and the conquerors often made themselves into
a nobility with specific legal privileges. In Japan before 1868 the
samurai had legal privileges, e.g. only samurai could carry two
swords. In France before the Revolution, the nobility were exempt
from taxes. It took revolutions to establish equality before the law
in many countries.

In most societies, equality before the law is not totally effective.
However, established violations are noted as scandalous. In feudal
societies, commoners were legally obliged to make way on the street
for nobles.

Equality before the law was a major component of the statement in the
American Declaration of Independence that "All men are created
equal".

There is no present-day demand for inequality before the law on behalf
of an upper class.

Equality of opportunity

Equality of opportunity can conflict with the freedom of parents
to provide improved opportunities for their children. In modern
societies, these issues tend to be compromised - at least in America.
School districts with richer taxpayers are required to subsidize the
poorer districts, but I am still free to provide my son
individualized, computerized mathematics instruction. In Britain
extreme leftists have long proposed to make private schools (called
"public schools") illegal.

Equality of outcome

Egalitarianism proper often amounts to a demand for equality of
outcome. Why should a person who happens to be intelligent, hard
working, kind, and who has a reputation for honestly fulfilling his
commitments make more money than someone whom fate has made stupid,
malevolent, violent, lazy, and dishonest?

The frank belief that equality of outcome is a human right exists but
is not common. Much more common today is the belief that inequality
of outcome is in itself evidence of failure to provide equality of
opportunity. This often leads to the same demands as would frank
egalitarianism of outcome. The major disadvantage of legislating
equality of outcome in some domain is that it eliminates incentives to
work hard to achieve reward in that domain. It also leads to flight
on the part of the able. In the U.S. this has mainly been middle
class flight to the suburbs, but in some other countries it has
stimulated emigration to the US.

Much more acceptable, even to most conservatives, is the doctrine that
society (usually taken as the Government) should maintain at least a
minimal standard of living for the unfortunate - and this without
looking into the extent to which the misfortune might be caused by the
unfortunate person's own actions or negligence. However, this is
possible only in a technologically advanced and prosperous society.
In backward societies, even the hardworking can be killed by a bad
winter or plague, and under sufficiently desperate conditions, the
undeserving cannot be helped without killing some of the deserving.

There is a practical reason for allowing intelligence and hard work
to lead to material success as long as there are more than one country
in the world. A government with very strong policies on who should
make how much money will be faced by emigration by those who think they can
do better elsewhere. All communist countries had to forbid emigration,
the extreme example being East Germany. Similarly a government with
determined views about what its citizens should believe will not allow
freedom of speech or of the press. Communist governments did this, but
so have many nationalist governments or those ruled by dictators.
Some American and British universities have punished both students
and faculty for their speech and writing. This hasn't been very
successsful yet.

Environmentalist Ideology

Environmentalist ideology in America has many threads. One of
them is descended from the movement to preserve nature of the 19th
century. This movement led to the creation of national parks,
starting with Yellowstone in 1872 during the Presidency of
U.S. Grant. Theodore Roosevelt was big on conservation and the
establishment of parks.

One of the first collisions of environmentalism with progress was
over the damming of the Hetch-Hetchy Valley shortly after 1900 to
provide a water supply for San Francisco. John Muir and the infant
Sierra Club opposed the dam. There was and still is no obvious
alternative. In the 1980s, I think, the Secretary of the Interior
offered to take down the dam if that was what California wanted. I
didn't hear of any movement for taking him up on the offer. However,
the old conservation movement favored progress per se, and the
establishment of national parks had bipartisan approval.

An important change in environmentalist ideology came with the publication in
1962 of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. The book introduced
a doom-saying note and an anti-capitalist or anti-corporation note.
This caused a confluence of environmentalism with leftist anti-capitalist
ideology. The ban-the-bomb movement then began to oppose nuclear power.

An important step was the switch of the Sierra Club in 1975 from
supporting nuclear power as less polluting than burning fossil fuels
to opposing it. Environmentalism allied itself with the
anti-establishment countercultural and anti-Vietnam movement.

American Indians have recently played a major role in
environmentalist ideology, although romanticism about the "noble
savage" goes back to Rousseau in the 18th century, and can even
be traced in some sense to Roman admiration of the German tribes
in ancient times. The 1971 Fake Version of an 1854 speech by
Chief Seattle still lives
in spite of having been exposed as fake many years ago.

Here's a quote from a 1999 email message that explains why the fake
speech still lives.

Oh, why did you have to open my eye! Here ,I was amazed and touched
by the "fake" version of Chief Seattle's speech. It conveyed a mystical
wisdom which was somehow comforting to me. I say "so what" if the
chief's words have been, from the beginning, embellished. They are good
words and maybe coming at a time when we all need to hear them. Who's
to say that the spirit of Chief Seattle was not whispering to the "tuned
in" ear of the environmentalist rewriting those words.

I remain "a strand In the web,"

Today environmentalist ideology is dominant in the educational
system, from kindergarten through college and in the media.
Schoolchildren are taught to recite slogans. My son's role in one of
these pageants was to recite repeatedly and as quickly as possible
"Full circle food cycle". I forget what grade he was in at the time.
The pageant was rehearsed and then performed by his class on a local
TV station.

Moralism

There have always been people who felt their neighbors didn't live or
believe quite as they should and wished to reform them - sometimes
violently. Sometimes this was with good reason and sometimes not.
Historically, moralist reformism has mostly taken a religious form.
Sometimes moralists win political power, but they always lose it after
a while.

Here are two relevant literary quotations.

On the whole human beings want to be good but not too good and
not quite all the time. - George Orwell

A hardened reformer never seems to be able to make up his mind which
is the most beautiful word in the language - "compulsory" or
"forbidden". - Robert Ryder, as quoted by James Thurber

Here's a collection of quotations expressing
what strike me as extremist views. Perhaps they were written at 2am.
Maybe the authors wouldn't endorse them all today. I have seen some
wriggling on the part of some of them. It is interesting to note that
Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 predictions of massive famines in the 1970s
proved spectacularly wrong, has received the Swedish Crafoord Prize of
$330,000 and the more recent Tyler Prize of $200,000. See Ehrlich's
predictions in the file of quotations. A
substantial part of the environmentalist movement is inclined to
predict doom unless repentance is quick. The above-mentioned
foundations seem to prize attitude and influence more than facts.

ENVIRONMENALIST IDEOLOGY AND LAW

When environmental ideology dominates law or regulation making, the
rules are often not cost-effective. One regulation costs $150 billion per
expected life saved. In recent years Congress has put some requirements
for cost-effectiveness, but enthusiastic bureaucrats have been known
to evade Congressional requirements.

An interesting case of wishful thinking is that of the California
Air Resources Board. It has made rules requiring that a certain
fraction of cars sold in California by each manufacturer be entirely
non-polluting. CARB ruled that electric cars powered by lead-acid
batteries met the requirement. General Motors, Ford and the others
built electric cars and tried to lease them. Because the cars have
very low range very few were leased, and by 2003 January the GM and
Ford projects had been abandoned after several billion dollars had
been wasted. That such performance would be unacceptable had been
predicted in 1910 by an electric car consortium consisting of Henry
Ford, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell. When the consortium
couldn't develop a good enough battery they gave up. The more recent
attempt spent vastly more money but gave up in 2003 for exactly the
same reasons that made Ford, Edison, and Bell give up (perhaps before
1920.

The Energy Religion

For reasons discussed in the pages on energy, energy is the commodity for which we
can see adequate supplies into the indefinite future. Nevertheless, today
most politicians and the press make a religion out of using as little
energy as possible, far beyond what is indicated by economy.
Engineering effort has been squandered on achieving small energy
savings that could much better have been spent on improving the
product. (I suspect that Energy Star compliance for computer equipment
represents misplaced engineering effort. If the money spent on it had
been spent on developing large flat panel displays, maybe we would have
bigger ones now. Purely incidentally, present flat panel displays
use less than half the energy of corresponding CRT displays.) [2007 note:
We have the flat panel displays now - but still not wall size.]

The energy religion is a phenomenon that started in the early
1970s. Its origin is associated with the anti-nuclear movement. This
in turn is associated with the ban-the-bomb movement, which is
associated with anti-Western and
anti-American ideology. Intellectually,
the associations are rather loose. However, in terms of tribal
allegiances, the associations are strong. The movements go from
one issue to another. The anti-nuclear power movement got a boost in
1975 when the Vietnam War ended and the radicals needed a new cause.
Former California Governor Jerry Brown said "Nuclear power will be the
Vietnam issue of the 1980s."

What is left over from Marxism, namely the identification of
capitalism as the source of evil, plays an important role in these
ideologies, even though most of Marxist doctrine is almost unknown in
the environmentalist left. Here is a Web page on Marxist ideology.

Sin

The belief that man is inherently vile arose repeatedly in human
history. It was prominent among the early Christians and is still
prevalent among some Christian denominations. It arises time and
again among literary intellectuals and environmentalists. Sometimes
all man is vile, and sometimes the vileness is limited to white,
European males.

Here's a nice one from a prominent literary ideologist.

The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra,
Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque
churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant
Marx, Balanchine ballet, et al., don't redeem what this
particular civilization has wrought upon the world.
The white race is the cancer of human history. It is the white
race and it alone--its ideologies and inventions---
which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it
spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the
planet, which now threatens the very existence of life
itself. - Susan Sontag, Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57.

The same Susan Sontag strongly hinted in the New Yorker
issue after the 2001 September 11 terrorist attack that we deserved
it. It shows a remarkable consistency of attitude over 34 years.

Over the years scientists have come under attack for views that offend
religion or leftism or plaintiffs' lawyers. The New Know-Nothings:
the political foes of the scientific study of human nature
by Morton Hunt describes attacks from the left, attacks from the right, and
attacks that can't be classified in this way. The left doesn't like
the study of the genetics of behavior, especially of intelligence. The right
doesn't like the study of sex. Feminists dislike the woman who
uncovered that many "memories" of childhood sex abuse were put there by the
psychotherapists. Plaintiffs' lawyers don't like the 1999 report that there
is no evidence that breast implants caused major diseases. Hunt's book
is an excellent summary.

While anti-scientific attitudes have stemmed from both the left
and the right, since WWII the left has been more powerful
ideologically and has been more dangerous to freedom and objectivity.
Thus the efforts by part of the religious right to bar the teaching of
evolution have mainly failed. In Kansas a majority of the state
school board eliminated evolution from state examination requirements.
After protests, including much jeering at Kansas, three of the members
who voted for banning evolution from the requirements were defeated in
the Republican primaries and the requirement for including evolution
in the examinations was restored.

Global Warming

Global warming became a major ideological bandwagon in preparation
for the Kyoto Conference. Vice-President Gore went
so far as to call dissenters un-American.

Here's a link to
The Science and Energy Policy Project, perhaps the leading
dissenting organization - if an organization can be said to be leading on a
budget of $150,000 per year (1998).

Ideology in the Scientific Community

Here's an excellent reminiscence of the effects of ideology on
science, entitled Science and Ideology by Edward O. Wilson. Wilson is
famous for his work on ants and his Sociobiology that looks
for evolutionary explanations for many aspects of animal and human
behavior. Wilson's ideas are less controversial today than they were
when he first proposed them. They are one of the elements of
evolutionary psychology, which studies how some important
human psychological characteristics have evolved.

Even in 2001 sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are fiercely
attacked, not just with claims that they are incorrect, but on grounds
that they are racist and imperialist. Exorcising Sociobiology, by the microbiologist Paul Gross,
describes the recent attacks on the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon
and the late geneticist James Neel as racist, imperialist, etc.
Although the charge that Neel had set off an epidemic of measles among
the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon were promptly refuted and had to
be withdrawn, the opponents of evolutionary psychology still hoped to
salvage a scandal.

Outside of their own work, many scientists today are as much affected by
ideology as any other intellectuals.

The scientists whose names were solicited to sign this statement very
likely didn't agree with every formulation. Each had to decide
whether he agreed with enough of it and whether he thought the
warnings in the statement were important enough to justify signing.
Of course, some people refuse to sign statements unless they agree
with every bit of them.

Note that the view that iron fertilization should not even be researched,
because it involves tinkering with nature, does not depend on any
specific scientific facts. However, exponents of the view will give
any scientific considerations that can be interpreted as supporting their
views. In the present case, they involve emphasizing the possibilities
that iron fertilization won't work or will be harmful if it does.

A commentary in Nature for 1997 August 7 by Donald
M. Anderson was entitled "Turning back the harmful red tide". It
discussed the possibility of control measures that would kill the
ocean bacteria that cause the red tides that kill millions of fish and
make shell fish poisonous to people. Anderson discusses the
ideological objections that hinder attacking marine pests in ways
similar to those used to attack pests on land. (quotes later).

The scientific community is strongly affected by the ideological
milieu. The 1995 report of The Inter Governmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) is now out. Here are some comments.

The claim is often made that global warming will bring the tropical
diseases, e.g. malaria, dengue and yellow fever, further north. This
claim has been made by many scientists eager to do good, but
apparently not by the specialists in these diseases. Dr. Paul Reiter,
Chief, Entomology Section, Dengue Fever Branch, Centers for Disease
Control, wrote
Global warming and vector-borne disease: is warmer
sicker?. In it he complains about "rocket scientists" spreading myths
about tropical diseases. This is only a side remark in the long article
which tells about the current state of insect borne disease world wide. His
main point is that "wealthier is healthier", i.e. the elimination of malaria
from Western countries isn't a matter of climate but of being able to
afford screens, air conditioning and anti-mosquito control measures.
It provides more evidence of the effect of ideology on scientists outside
of their own fields.

According to simulations reported 2002 September 27 in
Science, soot is an important influence on regional climate.
The largest inputs are from cooking with coal and animal dung in China
and India. Mainly it affects the weather in these countries and their
neighbors. Its ideological sign is the opposite of that of
CO2. It's the underdeveloped countries that cause the problem by
their backward ways of cooking and heating. If the soot effect turns out
to be large, I predict it won't much change environmentalist ideas
about who are the villains.

Here's an article Climate
Controls by Gregory Benford, a physicist at UC Irvine and
science fiction writer. He describes many possibilities for
mitigating global warming. He also describes the ideological
objections to actively mitigating global warming, especially among
scientists. Benford quotes Sherwood Rowland, the co-discoverer of the
danger to the ozone layer and recipient of many honors for that as
saying "I am unalterably opposed to global mitigation." Later note:
Apparently Rowland has changed his mind to some extent.

George Orwell wrote about "nationalism" with not quite the
conventional meaning. His notion overlaps the "tribalism" discussed
above. The article is, as is everything Orwell wrote, extremely
informative. It is to be found on the
Orwell web site along with other political writings.

S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist, heads the Science and Environmental Policy
Project. They are skeptical of global warming and offer much
evidence of how a good part of the scientific establishment is
sufficiently committed to green ideologies to distort the consequences
of science, especially when it is out of their own fields.

Fear of ideological attack

Here's an excerpt from an article in the 1998 December
Science and Technology Review, the house magazine of
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The whole article deals
with the collection of energy projects in which LLNL is involved.
The important thing to note is that storing waste at Yucca Mountain is and
will be subject to fierce attack from the ideological anti-nukes. There
will be lawsuits. However, the writers of the article choose not to
notice the ideological component of the decision to activate Yucca Mountain
as a waste storage site or of the opposition to this decision.

The decision to ignore ideological attacks is undoubtedly correct
from the point of view of getting their work done. However, it means
that counterattacks on the anti-nuke ideologists are left to amateurs
like me, and there is no publicly available analysis
of the anti-nuke meme.

2000 October note: A bill to authorize further work on the Yucca
Mountain repository was passed by the House and Senate but vetoed
successfully by President Clinton. Lack of progress on a permanent
waste site is extremely important to the anti-nuke movement.
2002 October note: The bill was passed again by both houses
and signed by President Bush. Alas it is predicted to be 2010 before any
waste is actually stored.

There is one mistake common to both those who predict widespread
extinctions and those who doubt the prediction including the Idsos.
Neither considers intentional human action to move the range of a
species. Thus if it is discovered that a species of tree will grow
better 500 miles north of its present northernmost boundary, trees can
be planted in the new area. Not even discussing such actions is
common among scientists, less so among engineers. See my discussion
of Global Engineering.

Fri Apr 16 01:41:32 2004: This really belongs somewhere else but I can't
remember where I referred to William Calvin's Atlantic Monthly
article in which he predicted doom from the Gulf Stream disappearing and
thus giving Western Europe a climate like Siberia. He predicted streams of
refugees and wars, whereas I said the Europeans would invent and engineer
their way out of the problem and had some students calculate what it would
cost to greenhouse Western Europe's agricultural areas. I also predicted
that Calvin's 1998 article would lead to a disaster flic. Indeed The
Day After Tomorrow is a soon-to-be released disaster flic along these
lines. The 2004 April 17 Science also has a letter from
Wallace Broecker who originated the idea of the Gulf Stream being clobbered in
the past and in the possible future. Broecker denounces the more lurid
ten year predictions and says it can't happen for 75 to 100 years. Alas,
neither Broecker nor I will be around to see.

I worry that boredom with prosperity and peace will stimulate many
people to adopt aggressive ideological extremist views. The news was most
interesting during WWII, became less interesting during the cold war
and bcame still less interesting after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

To us, to whom safety has become monotony, to whom the primeval
savageries of nature are so remote as to become a mere pleasing
condiment to our ordered routine, the world of dreams is very
different from what it was amid the wars of Guelf and Ghibelline.
Hence William James's protest against what he calls the "block
universe" of the classical tradition; hence Nietsche's worship of
force; hence the verbal bloodthirstiness of many quiet literary men.
The barbaric substratum of human nature, unsatisfied in action, finds
an outlet in imagination. In philosophy, as elsewhere, this tendency
is visible; and it is this, rather than formal argument, that has
thrust aside the classical tradition for a philosophy which fancies
itself more virile and more vital.
- Bertrand Russell in "Our knowledge of the external world", p.10,
1914, delivered as Lowell lectures, March and April 1914

Note that World War I started in August 1914, four months after
Russell's lecture.. I don't suppose it was philosophy that made
Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary, Tsar Nicholas of Russia, and
Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany bored with peace. Mark Twain wrote that the
American Civil War was partly the fault of Walter Scott who
romanticized chivalry and undid the good that Cervantes had done in
making fun of it.

All man's miseries arise from not being able to sit quietly in a room
alone. - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

A Perspective article "Global Warming and the Next Ice Age"
by
Andrew J. Weaver and Claude Hillaire-Marcel,
Science 16 April 2004: 400-402 gives the current view that
the effects will be much milder than the disaster flic predicts.

2007 January: If I had time, I'd update this page with more recent
quotes. The general effect wouldn't change much, but maybe some of
the media have become a little more rational. The leadership of the
scientific community has become slightly less rational in its 2006
attack on Exxon for supporting scientists skeptical about
global warming.

Send comments to mccarthy@stanford.edu. I sometimes make changes
suggested in them. -
John McCarthy